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Speaking on a first-floor wing (known as the ‘MakerSpace’) of Tandon’s 6 Metrocenter building in Brooklyn, Glen described a cross-borough investment of $6 million by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME). The lab-hub’s ambitions to fuse VR and AR education, entrepreneurial pursuits and corporate enterprise echo those of the NYC Media Lab, a public-private partnership founded by the NYCEDC that operates out of 2 Metrocenter. Indeed, NYC Media Lab Executive Director Justin Hendrix was on site for the announcement and hailed for his role in pushing the deal.

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The move is part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s larger New York Works initiative, which aims, the press release quotes the mayor, “to spur 100,000 good-paying jobs in ten years,” many of those in tech and related sectors. Per the press release and declarations repeated ad nauseam throughout the event, “the lab will directly create over 500 jobs over the next ten years.” First, of course, it has to open; that’s scheduled to happen near the end of 2017.

Photo by Road to VR

Deputy Mayor Glen was not the only city official to speak. Councilman and Chair of the Committee on Economic Development Daniel R. Garodnick—who represents a motley mass of mid-Manhattan neighborhoods that includes what many say is the city’s unequivocal pit, Murray Hill—appeared in Brooklyn to tout “silicon alley,” a uniquely grim bit of dad-joke marketing coined, of course, in the ’90s. One struggles to imagine it attracting anyone to New York in 2017. Media and Entertainment Commissioner Julie Menin kindly refrained from using the term during her remarks.